arXiv:2510.11402cs.IR2025-10被引 6

冷启动推荐会继承热门物品偏见,导致小众物品被高估。

On Inherited Popularity Bias in Cold-Start Item Recommendation

  • 用内容特征估算热度,替代交互数据
  • 冷启动模型对热门物品的预测偏差更大
  • 通过嵌入幅度修正可平衡推荐结果

协同过滤推荐系统在处理未见过的‘冷启动’物品时面临挑战。现有方法常依赖热模型进行监督学习,以融合协同与内容信息。然而,这些冷启动模型可能继承热模型的预测偏见。本文揭示,冷启动系统会继承热门偏见——即过度偏好流行物品,忽视稀有物品。由于缺乏交互数据,冷启动模型只能依赖内容特征估算热度,导致与热门物品内容相似的冷启动物品被显著高估,即使其真实热度极低。我们在三个多媒体数据集上测试了三种生成式冷启动方法,发现该问题普遍存在。随后提出一种简单后处理策略:利用嵌入向量的模长作为预测热度的代理,可有效缓解偏见,且对用户导向准确率影响有限。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems struggle with making predictions on unseen, or 'cold', items. Systems designed to address this challenge are often trained with supervision from warm CF models in order to leverage collaborative and content information from the available interaction data. However, since they learn to replicate the behavior of CF methods, cold-start models may therefore also learn to imitate their predictive biases. In this paper, we show that cold-start systems can inherit popularity bias, a common cause of recommender system unfairness arising when CF models overfit to more popular items, thereby maximizing user-oriented accuracy but neglecting rarer items. We demonstrate that cold-start recommenders not only mirror the popularity biases of warm models, but are in fact affected more severely: because they cannot infer popularity from interaction data, they instead attempt to estimate it based solely on content features. This leads to significant over-prediction of certain cold items with similar content to popular warm items, even if their ground truth popularity is very low. Through experiments on three multimedia datasets, we analyze the impact of this behavior on three generative cold-start methods. We then describe a simple post-processing bias mitigation method that, by using embedding magnitude as a proxy for predicted popularity, can produce more balanced recommendations with limited harm to user-oriented cold-start accuracy.

冷启动推荐系统偏见内容特征

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